About: ThinkUp Inspirations

Many other platforms perform some of the same functions or provide some of the same capabilities as ThinkUp; We should learn from their examples, and also try to share back with them what we've discovered about ideas that work. Here are some other projects to ponder:

• The Archivist A clean tweet archiving/analytics app from a few Microsofties; Lead dev Karsten offered up his experiences and learnings on the ThinkUp list, and there's a nice history of many of their decisions online. This post, on how their architecture evolved, might be of particular interest.
• BackupMyTweets Hosted backup service; provides search. Premium option allows for saving searches, storing their results also.
• Chirpstory: Twitter-focused curation tool. Allows for arbitrary selection and ordering of the updates shown.
• Crowdbooster: Tool for businesses to manage social media relationships with customers. Interesting dashboard, and a site that features copy like "You are a visionary who believes in the promise of social media marketing. You believe that relationships with customers are everything and that every business should be an active participant in the community both on and offline."
• Curated.by: TechCrunch says this is in a similar category, but it's tough to tell how it relates to Storify or Chirpstory.
• Engag.io: Conversation thing.
• Exquisite Tweets: Paste in the URL from a single tweet in a conversation to get a one-page thread you can share or save.
• Greplin: Stores and indexes a range of social media and collaboration services. 'Autocompletes' on your archive as you type a string into the search box. Appears to retain a 'moving window' of indexed data– free version is currently 200MB. For Twitter, archives your twitter stream (starting from the point of activation) as well as your own posts and DMs.
• Keepstream: An archive service which adds the concept of 'collections': "Keepstream is a social media curation tool that gathers all your favorite content in one place. We pull in content from multiple sources, including Facebook likes and Twitter retweets, and let users build 'collections' of social media content. Users control the presentation of their content, add their commentary, and embed these collections on a website or blog."
• Laterstars App built around the idea of "favoriting stuff for later". Interesting way of surfacing good stuff, that could work well with our new favorites capabilities.
• Memolane- currently in beta Not dissimilar to Momento in terms of concept, but a web service– keeps a day-by-day record of what you've posted to various services. Allows different privacy levels.
• Momento: An iOS (iPhone-optimized) app built around a journal concept, which begins by importing Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Foursquare, Gowalla, YouTube, and many more services to provide a view of your personal history. Very cleanly optimized for those who want to explore their own past actions/conversations in a beautiful UI.
• ReSearch.ly Paid platform, allows search of "1,000 days of Twitter data". From TC: "ReSearch.ly is essentially a high-powered Twitter search and analytics platform that allows users drill down by keyword, demographic, location, and more. ReSearch.ly also sorts Tweets by sentiment, and by community (i.e. Mommy Bloggers, Reporters)."
• Socialware Sync Another archiving app.
• Storify Storify is optimized for curating Twitter threads in a publishing context. In their words, "Storify is a way to tell stories using social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. You search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into your story. You can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers."
• Summify (and news.me, which just launched) suggest things to read based on finding clusters of posted links from the people you follow. I (Amy) am finding this amazingly useful. I would love to build a plugin that did this.
• SwiftRiver: Open source app provides news filtering and analysis. "Enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds. This free tool is especially useful for organizations who need to sort their data by authority and accuracy, as opposed to popularity."
• Timehop: Daily email of your tweets, foursquare check-ins, Facebook status updates, and Instagr.am photos from exactly one year ago.
• Trunk.ly: "By connecting into your social networks, Trunk.ly monitors and collects the links that you find interesting across the social web." E.g. for Twitter, "We extract all links from your tweets, retweets and tweets you favourite." Collects shared Facebook and Delicious links as well.
• Twapper Keeper (open-source/hosted): Allows for archives to be created based on #hashtag, @person, or keywords, and also collections of archives.
• TweeQL: Performs roughly like an SQL for the Twitter API. Python-based, includes sentiment analysis.
• TweetNest: Very cool PHP/MySQL tweet archiving app. Has a beautiful UI and visualizations, but not trying to do multiple networks, etc. as ThinkUp does. It may make sense to collaborate with them on a JSON representation of tweets so that both platforms can use the same visualizations, etc.
• Twitsprout
• Twitoaster Twitoaster is a hosted service offering a fairly nice presentation of almost exactly ThinkUp's conversation view, though of course they've got ads on it too. Oddly, they seem to rank pretty well in Google for a lot of conversations, but we should look for at least reaching parity with what they've got.
• Twitalyzer: Twitter analytics (paid).
• Vox Event Analytics: A datamining/visual analytics research project out of Rutgers. E.g, the 2010 SOTU is one such event they analyzed. More on how it works. Also: http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/diamonds-in-the-rough_VAST_cr1.pdf